Philosophical interest in situated cognition has been focused most intensely on the claim that human cognitive processes extend from the brain into the tools humans use. As we see it, this radical hypothesis is sustained by two kinds of mistakes, the confusion of coupling relations with constitutive relations and an inattention to the mark of the cognitive. Here we wish to draw attention to these mistakes and show just how pervasive they are. That is, for all that the radical philosophers (...) have said, the mind is still in the head. (shrink)

Free Public Reason examines the idea of public justification, stressing its importance but also questioning the coherence of the concept itself. Although public justification is employed in the work of theorists such as John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, and others, it has received little attention on its own as a philosophical concept. In this book Fred D'Agostino shows that the concept is composed of various values, interests, and notions of the good, and that no ranking of these is (...) possible. The notion of public justification itself is thus shown to be contestable. In demonstrating this, D'Agostino undermines many current political theories that rely on this concept. Having broken down the foundations of public justification, D'Agostino then offers an alternative model of how a workable consensus on its meaning might be reached through the interactions of a community of interpreters or delegates at a constitutional convention. (shrink)

Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis is most often applied to multicellular animals and the complexity of their macroscopic environments to explain how cognition evolved. We think that the ECT may be less suited to explain the origins of the animal bodily organization, including this organization’s potentiality for dealing with complex macroscopic environments. We argue that acquiring the fundamental sensorimotor features of the animal body may be better explained as a consequence of dealing with internal bodily—rather than environmental complexity. To press and (...) elucidate this option, we develop the notion of an animal sensorimotor organization that derives from an internal coordination account for the evolution of early nervous systems. The ASMO notion is a reply to the question how a collection of single cells can become integrated such that the resulting multicellular organization becomes sensitive to and can manipulate macroscopic features of both the animal body and its environment. In this account, epithelial contractile tissues play the central role in the organization behind complex animal bodies. In this paper, we relate the ASMO concept to recent work on epithelia, which provides empirical evidence that supports central assumptions behind the ASMO notion. Second, we discuss to what extent the notion applies to basic animal architectures, exemplified by sponges and jellyfish. We conclude that the features exhibited by the ASMO are plausibly explained by internal constraints acting on and within this multicellular organization, providing a challenge for the role the ECT plays in this context. (shrink)

The Sphex story is an anecdote about a female digger wasp that at first sight seems to act quite intelligently, but subsequently is shown to be a mere automaton that can be made to repeat herself endlessly. Dennett and Hofstadter made this story well known and widely influential within the cognitive sciences, where it is regularly used as evidence that insect behavior is highly rigid. The present paper discusses the origin and subsequent empirical investigation of the repetition reported in the (...) Sphex story. The repetition was first observed by Henri Fabre in 1879, and the last empirical study I found was published in 1985. In contrast to the story's clear message, the actual results have always been equivocal: the endless repetition is not standard. In addition, this repetition itself has become a minor aside in the literature on digger wasps when put in the perspective of many other examples of adaptiveness and flexibility. Nevertheless, the story and its message have to this day persevered within the cognitive sciences. For some reason, the counterevidence has been neglected time and again. The paper closes by presenting two different but compatible hypotheses that could explain why humans keep repeating this particular anecdote. (shrink)

This study examines the use of names in the construction of “credibility” as a journalistic duty. Using the framework set forth by Tuchman (1972) of objectivity as a “strategic ritual,” the study discusses the ethical justifications put forth by the New York Times for the process through which it decided to identify a CIA interrogator who had been involved in questioning 9/11 captives. The examination concludes that the facticity of naming should ultimately be uncoupled from the concept of credibility.

The aim of the present study is to evaluate the postmodern belief that selves are narrative constructions. Four theories, varying in degree of anti-realism, are presented and discussed. It is concluded that an attractive feature of the narrative approach is that it explains how we achieve a sense of unity. But the main idea, that selves are constituted or created by stories is problematic, like identifying footprints on the beach with the feet that made them.

A discussion is going on in cognitive science about the use of representations to explain how intelligent behavior is generated. In the traditional view, an organism is thought to incorporate representations. These provide an internal model that is used by the organism to instruct the motor apparatus so that the adaptive and anticipatory characteristics of behavior come about. So-called interactionists claim that this representational specification of behavior raises more problems than it solves. In their view, the notion of internal representational (...) models is to be dispensed with. Instead, behavior is to be explained as the intricate interaction between an embodied organism and the specific make up of an environment. The problem with a non-representational interactive account is that it has severe difficulties with anticipatory, future oriented behavior. The present paper extends the interactionist conceptual framework by drawing on ideas derived from the study of morphogenesis. This extended interactionist framework is based on an analysis of anticipatory behavior as a process which involves multiple spatio-temporal scales of neural, bodily and environmental dynamics. This extended conceptual framework provides the outlines for an explanation of anticipatory behavior without involving a representational specification of future goal states. (shrink)

We submit a normative pragmatic theory of exhorting—an account of conceptually necessary and potentially efficacious components of a coherent strategy for securing a sympathetic hearing for efforts to urge and inspire addressees to act on high-minded principles. Based on a Gricean analysis of utterance-meaning, we argue that the concept of exhorting comprises making statements openly urging addressees to perform some high-minded, principled course of action; openly intending to inspire addressees to act on the principles; and intending that addressees’ recognition of (...) the intentions to urge and inspire creates reasons for addressees to grant a sympathetic hearing to what the speaker has to say. We show that the theory accounts for the design of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. By doing so we add to the inventory of reasons why social actors make arguments, continue a line of research showing the relationship of arguing to master speech acts, and show that making arguments can be an effective strategy for inspiring principled action. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to find a satisfactory way of understanding what traits are. As a starting point, two recent accounts of the nature of traits, the act frequency approach and the intention frequency approach, are presented and discussed. The act frequency approach is criticized for taking all traits to be behavioral dispositions, and for not offering any explanation of behavior. The intention frequency approach is criticized for being equally one-sided in regarding all traits as mental frequency (...) dispositions. It is claimed that some traits are purely behavioral, that some are behavioral and mental, and that some are purely mental. Finally, it is argued that mental phenomena like beliefs and desires, the phenomena that make up reasons for and explain actions, are not frequency dispositions. They are dispositional properties of another kind, namely abilities, capacities or powers. (shrink)

The question discussed in the present paper is whether actions that are free can be thought of as rational. According to one view, no free action could be rational. According to another, all free actions must be rational. I argue that both these positions are false and that there is no necessary connection between freedom and rationality. Some free actions are rational, others are not.

This article looks at press interpretations of the role of images—specifically, images of national enemies in death—in constructing various duties of media truth-telling. Discourse about the need, or duty, to publish photos of the Nazi leaders hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 provides a context for examining discourse surrounding a similar decision that the White House faced after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. What was seen largely as a third-person effect seven decades ago is more often (...) seen now as a first-person effect: We no longer need to persuade or daunt the slain enemy's die-hard followers, but we have created a set of obligations to persuade or please ourselves. (shrink)

Cognitive science's basic premises are under attack. In particular, its focus on internal cognitive processes is a target. Intelligence is increasingly interpreted, not as a matter of reclusive thought, but as successful agent-environment interaction. The critics claim that a major reorientation of the field is necessary. However, this will only occur when there is a distinct alternative conceptual framework to replace the old one. Whether or not a serious alternative is provided is not clear. Among the critics there is some (...) consensus, however, that this role could be fulfilled by the concept of a 'behavioral system'. This integrates agent and environment into one encompassing general system. We will discuss two contexts in which the behavioral systems idea is being developed. Autonomous Agents Research is the enterprise of building behavior-based robots. Dynamical Systems Theory provides a mathematical framework well suited for describing the interactions between complex systems. We will conclude that both enterprises provide important contributions to the behavioral systems idea. But neither turns it into a full conceptual alternative which will initiate a major paradigm switch in cognitive science. The concept will need a lot of fleshing out before it can assume that role. (shrink)

'Original and provocative . . . engagingly written. (C Fred Alford) counters Levinas's notorious obscurity with a goodly dose of transparency' - John Lechte, Macquarrie University Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be ...

Table of Contents 1 Policy-making, prediction and the theory of international behaviour 5 2 Social science, naturalism and scientific realism 33 3 Theory, observation and law 63 4 Natural causation, social action and international politics 87 5 Prediction, theory and policy-making 126 6 Explaining agreement and disagreement in the natural sciences and social sciences 172 7 Conclusions 207.

Summary: A review of the cognitivist/extended cognition and extended mind landscape.

In this investigation of the contemporary notion of evil, C. Fred Alford asks what we can learn about this concept, and about ourselves, by examining a society where it is unknown--where language contains no word that equates to the English term "evil." Does such a society look upon human nature more benignly? Do its members view the world through rose-colored glasses? Korea offers a fascinating starting point, and Alford begins his search for answers there.In conversations with hundreds of Koreans (...) from diverse religions and walks of life--students, politicians, teachers, Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, Catholic priests, housewives, psychiatrists, and farmers--Alford found remarkable agreement about the nonexistence of evil. Koreans regard evil not as a moral category but as an intellectual one, the result of erroneous Western thinking. For them, evil results from the creation of dualisms, oppositions between people and ideas.Alford's interviews often led to discussions about imported ways of thinking and the impact of globalization upon society at large. In particular, he was struck by how Koreans' responses to globalization matched Westerners' views about evil. In much of the world, he argues, globalization is the ultimate dualism--attractive for the enlightenment and freedom it brings, terrifying for the great social and personal upheaval it can cause. (shrink)

The self is a topic that crosses a great many disciplinary boundaries; concepts of the self are central to political science, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, and classical studies. In this book, C.Fred Alford sets forth a psychoanalytic account of the self and applies it to texts by Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawis, and Rouseau in order to draw out their implicit, often inchoate, assumptions about the self.

Taking his point of departure from William James and, by implication, Franz Brentano, Alfred Schutz made explicit the multifaceted experience of sub-universes as a phenomenon for phenomenological clarification on an entirely different foundation from James, Brentano and Husserl. The rethinking of Brentano, James and Husserl makes the phenomenon explicit in such a way that a vast new domain of phenomenological investigation is opened up.

Beyond intuitions: A biological interpretation of cognition How can the study of cognition become an ordinary science that is intrinsically connected to the other natural sciences? Since the cognitive revolution in and around psychology, ‘cognition’ has become the standard term to refer to the processes that make us – humans – intelligent. The interpretation of this cognitive domain and cognition itself, however, has never become really clear. First, cognition is a mental concept that is conceptually linked with theories and ideas (...) that are not self-evidently connected to the world as described by the natural sciences. In addition, cognition tends to remain a phenomenon that we recognize ‘on sight’, without the need for an explicit demarcation criterion, a ‘mark of the cognitive’. In this paper, I abandon this intuition-based demarcation of cognition and propose an unequivocal biological one. This biological demarcation does not build on our current intuitions concerning cognition and in any many cases will not be in line with these. As a consequence, the direct conceptual connection between cognition and the traditional notion of ‘mind’ will be cut and the term ‘cognition’ will acquire a fundamentally different meaning. However, the term ‘cognition’ can and will be maintained, as with its new meaning it still refers to the processes that make us humans – as well as other organisms – intelligent: it still covers the scientific domain that its original form was meant to cover, although now with some additional areas. The proposal states that cognition is to be interpreted as the interactions between organisms and their environments together with the organismal structures specifically involved in this interaction. This proposal gives a specific material foundation to cognitive phenomena, which can act as the empirical basis for existing and new cognitive theory formation that will place human cognition unequivocally in the wider framework of living organizations. Some of the implications of the proposal will be further illustrated by differentiating between agents and organisms. When organisms rather than agents form the focal point for cognition, due consideration can be given to ongoing research on intelligence in bacteria, plants and fungi, as well as research concerning the fundamental roles played by nervous systems in animals. (shrink)

Action in Perception Alva NoëCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005392 pages, ISBN: 0262140888 (hbk); $40.00When I started on Alva Noë's Action in Perception, I expected to be pleased with the book and to...

Brette criticizes the notion of neural coding as used in neuroscience as a way to clarify the causal structure of the brain. This criticism will be positioned in a wider range of findings and ideas from other branches of neuroscience and biology. While supporting Brette's critique, these findings also suggest the need for more radical changes in neuroscience than Brette envisions.

Borrett, Kelly and Kwan claim to provide neural-network models of important aspects of subjective human experience. To sidestep the long-standing and assumedly insurmountable problems with providing models of inner experience, they turn to a body-centered interpretation of experience, drawn from the work of Merleau-Ponty. This body-centered interpretation makes experience more tractable by linking it closely with bodily movement. However, when it comes to modeling, Borrett et al. ignore this body-centered interpretation and revert back to the traditional view of inner experience (...) as existing apart from the body. The result is uninteresting on two counts. The models that they present cannot be taken seriously as models of real inner experience. Additionally, these models do not apply to or extend the idea of a different, body-centered interpretation of experience either. (shrink)

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Van Gelder presents the distinction between dynamical systems and digital computers as the core issue of current developments in cognitive science. We think this distinction is much less important than a reassessment of cognition as a neurally, bodily, and environmentally embedded process. Embedded cognition lines up naturally with dynamical models, but it would also stand if combined with classic computation.